


ad finitum

by zipegs



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s01e09 The C the C the Open C, Experimental Style, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Missing Scene, gross overuse of classical literature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:00:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22192189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zipegs/pseuds/zipegs
Summary: When Henry Peglar dies, John Bridgens takes up his notebook and walks out into the cold.
Relationships: John Bridgens/Harry Peglar
Comments: 22
Kudos: 49
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	ad finitum

When Henry Peglar dies, John Bridgens takes up his notebook and walks out into the cold. He brings with him neither food nor water, and wears nothing save the clothes on his back—even his coat remains where it was strewn, on some unremarkable surface inside the tent where Peglar’s body lies. There had been no planning, no forethought; Henry was and then wasn’t, and when John could no longer bear to see him like that, cold and empty when once he had shone with laughter and vivacity, he had pulled the battered flap of canvas aside and left. 

He walks, and walks, and waits for the Arctic to swallow him whole. 

His absence, he thinks, is likely not yet noticed. If it is, he doubts any of the men have raised the alarm; anyone who wanders through camp looking for him might glimpse his waistcoat or cravat or any number of his personal effects scattered throughout the tent with little care and think him out seeking one of the lieutenants, lost in the labyrinth of beige and grey, or chasing a moment’s respite from the grief that tangles in the heart of it.

But that is not what this is. For Bridgens, this is finality— _in media res_ has given way to _denouement,_ and while he has made no decision, has come to no conclusion, he is versed enough to know with a detached sort of certainty that they are nearing the end of things. _His_ end, though, has already come; he has only to go out and meet it.

While scurvy has not closed its jaws around his throat as it has Henry and the others, John feels it nevertheless, ever-present in the bloating of his legs, the fatigue that presses down upon him with thick, roughened paws. His thoughts are scattered, too, illness and grief punching holes in the lining of his mind so that they might leak out, unencumbered and unrestrained, free and easy as the tide. Harry, naturally, is chief among them—John watches the course of their history together unravel like a drama, scenes tumbling end over end in the disarray of his mind. He is overcome with the scratch of pen nibs over paper, the rustle of pages and the nearby warmth of the hearth, Molière and Virgil and Aeschylus rolling warm and honey-sweet off sated tongues. John longs for it with an ache in his chest that rivals the pounding in his skull.

 _Soon, now,_ he thinks, as his feet battle on against stone and his body is buffeted by wind. _multum ille et terris iactatus et alto..._ [1] The line flits through him unbidden, and he thinks once again of Harry, imagines him frowning down at faded lines of verse with concentration writ in the furrow of his brow. He worries the stub of a pencil between thick fingers as he fits his lips around the words. _vi superum saeve memorem Iunonis ob iram._ [2] They sit awkwardly in his mouth, formed with neither ease nor familiarity, but that makes their shape all the sweeter. There had been countless nights like these, John remembers. The two of them huddling close together in his berth during stolen hours, soft yellow lamplight flickering warm and hazy over Harry’s face. It used to throw circles under his eyes and cast every line and wrinkle in high relief. Still, John had found him beautiful, had felt his heart stutter in his chest and thought _By God, he is no more than a boy_. 

It is not right that John is the one to survive him. He recalls—back when this thing between them had hung unspoken and unacknowledged, a humidity which had not yet broken into rain—sitting alone aboard the _Beagle_ and reminding himself how selfish it would be to indulge in this. To foster a love between them in the twilight of his life. Henry would live to see decades and decades with nothing but memory to hold him, while John’s remains putrefied beneath hard-packed soil. He had never imagined it would end like this; Henry’s life should have stretched long and verdant before him, and John, despite knowing the _Oresteia_ and _Hamlet_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ so intimately they might as well be seared into his flesh, never imagined that it might wither and fade before its time. _Death is a concern for old men,_ he thinks, _μάλιστα δ᾽ ἐμοί_.[3] For all his knowledge, he had been blind—perhaps that, then, is his hubris.

When his legs grow weary, and each step drives an iron-tipped chisel against his shins, John slows, and then stops, and then sinks to the ground. The stones are hard and burning cold, pressing bony fingers into his withered flesh, but he feels it all as though from a distance. Physical pain is of no concern to him now; his deepest aches are those throbbing deep within his soul. He clutches Harry’s notebook to his chest and curls onto his side, calling wordlessly— _Creusa, Creusa!_ [4]—but no apparition comes in the form of his beloved; no kindly spirit thumbs frozen tears from his cheeks and bids him persevere. It is just as well; there is nothing for him now save death, of which all the expedition’s men will soon taste. There will be no victory, no cry of _θάλαττα θάλαττα_ [5]—he knows this. Truth burrowed beneath his skin long ago, and it rises to the surface in wine-dark splotches,[6] in patches of red spurting forth like geysers from unmarred flesh. He has seen it echoed in the others’ eyes, the way a candle at the end of its wick sputters and fades.

It will not be long now. For any of them. 

Once, back when this endless journey was but a shadow looming in the corner, formless and foreboding, John had glanced up from his page and found that Henry had entered his berth and was watching him, exhaustion glazing his dark eyes. The lines of his face were open and honest, and he had clutched the _Anabasis_ between his calloused hands like a Bible. “Do you think we’ll make it? All of us?” he’d asked, and John had not known what to say. Then, even in the comfort and safety of the ships, the distance had seemed Herculean; in reality, it would be nigh insurmountable. He’d looked down at the splay of Henry’s fingers over the book’s battered black cover, as though he might find some answer in the contrast of his skin against the leather. “I don’t know,” he’d replied, hope and dread twining around his heart in equal measure. “But I think we must try.” _ἵνα πορεύῃ πεποιθὼς ἐν εἰρήνῃ πάσας τὰς ὁδούς σου, ὁ δὲ πούς σου οὐ μὴ προσκόψῃ_,[7] he had thought. _May it be so for him, if not for me._

He wonders now if he _had_ known—if, in all actuality, he’d known even earlier, when the first snippets of Captain Fitzjames’ and Master Blanky’s conversation floated up into his ears and painted desolation in his mind. These men, John thinks (and he himself is to be counted among them), are as Oedipus, crawling out of destruction’s maw only to stretch out their necks for another sharper set of teeth. In hindsight, with all laid bare before them, it is maddeningly, horrifyingly evident: whether by scurvy or tin, ice or beast, they will all of them perish, skeletons scattered like breadcrumbs across the shale. John doubts a single one of them will live to see salvation. 

They will die here, in this summer cold, and their bones will bleach on the grey shingle. There is to be no burial for them here, no warm loam to blanket their pockmarked flesh; even if there were, none now remain who might crack this icy earth with a spade and hollow out their graves. Those who survive them have the sickness woven through their sinew; they have no muscle to spare for such luxuries. And yet exposed as they will be, there are no birds to scavenge them, no creature to gnaw their marrow, save the one. They will bake in this heatless light; the flesh will drip from their bodies like fat over the fire, claiming this land in England’s name through death if not in life. 

_nudus in ignota Palinure iacebis harena_.[8] Only there is no sand here, no promise of a shore, and there will be none who will come _ut ossa pient et statuant tumulum et tumulo sollemnia mittant_ , nor _aeternumque locus suum nomen habebit_ ,[9] for this place is barren and cruel, tucked away in an unforgiving corner of the world which John knows with solemn certainty was never meant for them. It has chewed them up and spat them out again, these shameless men with flesh the color of old snow, who vaunted themselves to conquer a land untamable by any living being.

__

If they are bound to wander, restless and graveless, across these endless miles of toothed shale and empty horizon swollen with fog, so be it. He would rather it thus, and them together, than reach salvation emptyhanded.

__

John lies on his side and wonders distantly how much longer it will be, and whether Harry will be waiting for him when he gets there.

__

_Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead, Till of this flat a mountain you have made t’ o’ertop old Pelion or the skyish head Of Blue Olympus._ [10] Yet what mountain can be forged with naught but rock and ice? A cairn, perhaps, as the one which taunts them on the very border of this land. Untouched and unsighted for decades, likely to remain so for decades to come.

__

_That_ will be their grave marker, then. Their _hic iacet_ [11] scrawled in black ink within the margins of a piece of weathered parchment. _There will be poems_. But the only epic that will be sung of them is the wail of the wind as it whistles through the hollows of their bones.

____

His body resounds with the truth of it now. The summer chill pours itself into the empty spaces in his breast. John squints at the pale sun and tries to clench his thoughts between his fists, for fear they might flutter away like scraps of paper in the breeze.

____

He thinks of one afternoon a lifetime ago, when he and Henry had lain side by side in the privacy of John’s flat. They had spread a woolen blanket on the floor and split the curtains wide to let in the steadfast summer sun, which had caught on motes of dust that lingered in the air and turned the tips of Harry’s hair to bronze. He’d insisted they pry the window open, too, in hopes of lending some reality to their charade. “Pretend we’re in Hyde Park,” he had said, his fingers playing with the buttons on John’s shirtsleeves. “Like anyone can see us, and we don’t even care. Not one whit.”

____

He has spent so much of his life hiding, but it is not like that anymore. Things are changed now. Have been since they left their wooden shelters behind and sought salvation on the shale, shedding men like layers of clothing behind them. And besides, there is nothing the sun here does not see—it grants its victims no mercy, no grace. It will witness them die out here, unlidded and unrepentant, and it will watch on.

____

____

_Dawn appeared_ , he thinks distantly, _and touched the sky with roses_.[12]

____

____

____

He sees Henry slipping into his bedroll, one frigid night when the day’s walk had sapped all care for propriety and left weariness and longing in its stead. They waited until the majority of men were asleep, but the fear of discovery no longer hounded them, the threat of the gallows a relic of some distant past.

____

The rules are different, for men who are dying. _χαῖρε, αὐτοκράτορ· οἱ ἀπολούμενοί σε ἀσπαζόμεθα_ [13]

____

They’d slept facing each other, John’s mouth pressed gently against the dry and cracking skin of Harry’s forehead, and did not dream.

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His thoughts come slower now, each memory dropping from his mind like icemelt, sluggish and uncoordinated.

____

They gather in puddles beneath him and seep into the ground.

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_nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda._ [14]

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He can feel Harry’s arms twined around his neck, his head laid heavy on John’s shoulder. He had been so light, John thinks, as he blinks dazedly at the sideways horizon. So frail.

____

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_da mi basia mille_ [15]

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His eyes close, and he pictures the way his fingers had slotted like puzzle pieces in the valleys between the boy’s ribs.

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_John. Can we sleep?_

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_Yes._

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1 "buffeted much both by land and sea" Aeneid 1.3[return to text]  
  
2 "by divine will and Juno's unforgetting rage" Aeneid 1.4 [return to text]  
  
3 "and especially for me." a play on a construction used throughout the Odyssey by Telemachus ( _μῦθος δ' ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ' ἐμοί_ "speaking is of concern to all men, especially to me" 1.358-9, _πομπὴ δ' ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ' ἐμοί_ "his convoy is a matter for all men, especially for me" 11.352-3, etc.)[return to text]  
  
4 a reference to book two of the Aeneid—upon escaping from Troy, Aeneas realizes his wife Creusa had fallen behind. He returns and scours the city to find her, only to find her ghost. "I even dared to shout across the shadows, uselessly filling up the roads with grief, ceaselessly calling out Creusa's name. I went on, in my race to search the buildings, but the sad apparition of Creusa came to me, taller than the living woman. Shock choked my voice and stood my hair on end, but what she said was soothing to my soul." (2.769-75)[return to text]  
  
5 "The sea! The sea!" Anabasis 4.7.24. The Greek army cries out thus upon catching sight of the Black Sea, and their salvation.[return to text]  
  
6 a reference to the 1883 & 1887 translations by Andrew Lang et al. of the Homeric epithet _οἶνοψ πόντος,_ literally "the wine-looking sea"[return to text]  
  
7 "Then shalt thou walk in thy way safely, and thy foot shall not stumble." Proverbs 3:23[return to text]  
  
8 Aeneid 5.871 "You will lie unburied on some strange shore, Palinurus!" Sleep makes Palinurus fall asleep while steering Aeneas's ship, and he falls off the boat and drowns. Aeneas, upon realizing what has happened, laments that his friend won't get a proper burial.[return to text]  
  
9 Aeneid 6.379-81, _ut_ added and verb forms altered to fit its use in the sentence. "[to] appease your bones [and] raise a tomb and give it sacrifices" and "That place will be named for you forever." The priestess who leads Aeneas to the underworld assures Palinurus that foreigners will come and ease his suffering.[return to text]  
  
10 Hamlet 5.1.227-30. Laertes, upon casting himself into Ophelia's open grave. [return to text]  
  
11 "here lies" [return to text]  
  
12 a reference to the Odyssey. This is one of the ways in which Emily Wilson translates Homer's epithet for dawn, _ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς_ , literally rosy-fingered dawn, which almost always appears as: _ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς,_ "but when early-born rosy-fingered dawn appeared."[return to text]  
  
13 also: _ave imperator morituri te salutant_. "Hail, emperor, those who are about to die salute you." Supposedly uttered before a mock naval encounter in which captives/criminals were forced to fight to the death. Quoted in Suetonius's _De Vita Caesarum_ (in Latin) and Cassius Dio's _Ῥωμαϊκὴ Ἱστορία_ (in Greek).[return to text]  
  
14 "as for us, once our brief light sets, there is one perpetual night to be slept." Catullus 5.5-6[return to text]  
  
15 "give me a thousand kisses" Catullus 5.7[return to text]  


**Author's Note:**

> This is incredibly self-indulgent purple prose and I won't apologize for it!! Please do excuse any inaccuracies in my Greek/Latin, though, as it's been a while since I've used either 😭
> 
> Also, huge thank you to [vegetas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vegetas) for beta reading!
> 
> This work is a fill for my "John Bridgens" bingo square


End file.
